Scrapbook for June

26.06.2026 – Ingeborg Bachmann

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (25.06.1926-1973) with a piece by their in-house Austrian literary chap Paul Jandl.

Jandl's piece is largely incomprehensible, consisting mainly of clever remarks which ultimately say nothing: abstractions without any tether in reality. It takes talent to write this badly. Perhaps Bachmann thus gets the review she deserves, since her own work is often incomprehensible, frequently unhinged.

I can think of nothing cheerful to say about her. Her personality was overly introspective, her writings too, of course. As is so often the case with the overly introspective, alchohol and heavyweight antidepressants took over her life and her final years were heavily medicated. A lighted cigarette set fire to her in bed; she died a few weeks later in an Italian hospital.

In the search for something cheerful to write about her I had a quick skim through her books on my shelves. Meagre pickings. From the blurb on the back of an ancient copy of the dtv Simultan I got Die Qualität der Erzählungen liegt in den Zwischentönen und in all dem, was nicht ausgesprochen ist, 'The quality of her stories is to be found in the nuances and in all the things that are not explicit'. Well, that sounds about right.

Then I recalled that a friend of hers, the Austrian writer Uwe Johnson (1934-1984) left a witty anecdote about her, so, on her hundredth birthday, let's end on a brighter note:

1954: Piazza de la Quercia 1. Rome VII. One block away from the Via Giulia.

In the slovenly makeup of an Anna Magnani, with furious gestures that she did not need to copy from her great compatriot, a young black Roman woman bombarded two Carabinieri with a torrent of words. A chorus of lesser people, who were enjoying the free spectacle on their early morning way to work, stood around, applauded and cheered on the show.

Again and again the girl's arm shot out in the direction of the grey little palace with iron grates over its windows which stood out like a silent aristocrat among the red-yellow throng of small houses around it. Finally the representatives of Roman law and order nodded and set off at a dignified pace. The crowd watched and commented from the pavement.

The signorina, still half-asleep, who opened the door after the furious ringing of the bell by the police, is not from Rome: a lot of blonde hair, soft brown eyes, quiet and shy in expression and speech: The noise? Yes, that is occasionally so loud on the Piazza Quercia that one can scarcely work, even with the shutters fully closed.

No, the Carabinieri said, the signorina misunderstands: it is not about the noisy pleasures of her neighbours during the day on the Piazza, rather the horrible racket that the signorina makes at night. The young lady over there can hardly sleep because of the noise of the typewriter.

Finally the stranger understood. She fetched an ancient portable typewriter out: the noise machine was so small and she had to work at night, only then came the ideas.

What the signorina worked on at night?

Everything became clear to the police when a sheet of paper with a couple of lines in a barbarian tongue was proffered: 'Oh, poeta!' But as they left heads were shaking: 'such tiny poems and so much noise!'.

1954: Piazza de la Quercia 1. Roma VII. Einen Block entfernt von der Via Giulia.

Im schlampigen Make up einer Anna Magnani, mit furiosen Gebärden, die sie ihrer großen Landsmännin nicht zu entlehnen braucht, überschüttet eine junge schwarze Römerin zwei Carabinieri mit wildem Wortschwall. Ein Chor kleiner Leute, die das Gratis-Schauspiel auf dem Frühmorgenwege zur Arbeit genie­ßen, umsteht den Auftritt, spendet Beifall und feuert an.

Immer wieder schießt der Arm des Mädchens in die Richtung des grauen Palazzinos, das sich mit schwer kreuzvergitterten Fenstern als stiller Aristokrat vom rotgelben Gewimmel der wirr ineinandergebauten Häuschen abhebt. Endlich nicken die beiden Vertreter der römischen Staatsgewalt und setzen sich würdevoll in Bewegung. Die Menge beobachtet und kommentiert aus dem Stehparkett.

Die Signorina, die, noch halb im Schlaf, auf das polizeiliche Sturmläuten im Palazzino öffnet, ist keine Römerin: viel blondes Haar, sanftbraune Augen, still und scheu in Ausdruck und Rede: Der Lärm? Ja, der sei mitunter so groß auf der Piazza Quercia, daß man auch bei fest angezogenen Läden kaum arbeiten könne.

Nein, sagen die Carabinieri, die Signorina verstehe falsch: nicht um den genußvollen Lärm ihrer Nachbarn tagsüber auf der Piazza gehe es, sondern um den entsetzlichen Radau, den die Signorina nachts mache. Das Mädchen dort drüben könne nicht mehr schlafen – vor Schreibmaschinengeklapper.

Endlich hat die Fremde begriffen. Sie holt eine uralte Koffer­maschine herbei: So klein sei der Lärmapparat, und sie müsse nachts arbeiten, nur nachts kämen die Gedanken.

Was die Signorina denn nachts arbeite?

Verklärtes Verständnis bei der Polizei, als ein Blatt mit ein paar Zeilen in einer barbarischen Sprache vorgewiesen wird: „Oh, poeta!“ Aber beim Rückzug gibt es doch Kopfschütteln: „So kleine Gedichte und so viel Lärm!“

Uwe Johnson, Eine Reise nach Klagenfurt, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1974, (suhrkamp taschenbuch 235), ISBN 978-3-518-36735-3, p. 62f. Translation: FoS.

13.06.2026 – Anthem for the summer

We'll see how the Swiss vote tomorrow on the proposal to limit the population of Switzerland to ten million. Seems a bit on the high side to me – I think it was about six million when I arrived all those years ago. It's true: where I lead, others follow.

Just as in Britain, Europe and the USA, random, often deadly violence is becoming more common in Switzerland, although the authorities are just as active in clamping down on citizen unrest over perceived threats.

The bias of the authorities in Britain as they attempt to keep a lid on public anger, which they have been doing in some way or other since the sixties, is clear to everyone with eyes, ears and a brain. The people of Northern Ireland, practised rioters and insurgents, appear to be showing the rest of Britain how it is done. The UK government response is just making things worse:

@Michael Hennessey/X

Every summer since the sixties has had its anthem. We have come a long way since since that summer of love when we were urged to put flowers in our hair. There's a bad moon on the rise.

11.06.2026 – JD's chicken coop

A few days ago, a propos the generalised practical incompetence of our political masters, I quoted Ezra Pound's sturdy opinion: 'War, one war after another. / Men start ’em who couldn’t put up a good hen-roost' [Canto XVIII, p. 83].

Today brings news that the grace and favour residence of the Vice President and his family, the US Naval Observatory, has been gifted with a chicken coop by the North Carolina company, Carolina Coops.

Admittedly, he didn't build it himself, but it's a start. I don't think this is quite what Ezra had in mind for his 'hen-roost'.

I can only say that if I had been given something like this I would make it my home and put the chickens in my current hovel.

08.06.2026 – Jesus shall reign

For some reason, this hymn popped into my head this morning:

Jesus shall reign where'er the sun
Doth his successive journeys run;
His Kingdom stretch from shore to shore,
Till moons shall wax and wane no more.

Isaac Watts (1674-1748), written 1719. I don't know who wrote the music, which is (I believe) called'Truro'.

St Michael's Singers in Coventry Cathedral, Paul Leddington Wright (conductor).

That such stuff still fills my atheist brain is not really a surprise. I had long years of singing this in church and in morning assemblies in school. It has obviously been burned in, never to be removed.

The tune is singable, but this morning, while waiting for my coffee to dribble through the filter, I fell to thinking about the words.

The sentiment was sort of true when Watts wrote it in 1719, midway through the colonial expansion of Britain and the West in general. The sun never set on the far-flung British Empire and its religion was flung far and wide with it. The song 'Rule, Britannia!' was written in 1740, around twenty years after 'Jesus shall reign' and embodies the same buccaneering spirit.

It is not true now.

'Never glad confident morning again!'(©Browning) in Britain or Europe. There may still be places around the world where Jesus reigns, but they seem to be becoming fewer.

We think of the bloodthirsty genocide of Christians currently going on on the African continent – if ever there were a just cause for a Crusade against the infidel it is there, but Christians in Europe don't seem terribly perturbed about the gruesome fate of their co-religionists.

Ditto the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023. Since Christianity is part of the larger Judeo-Christian tradition, one would have thought that European Christians would seize their 'swords of burning gold' (©Blake). There may still be places around the world where Jesus reigns, but they seem to be fading fast.

The Christian core of the West, with the exception of the USA perhaps, continues to shrink, both numerically and morally. The New-Europeans are mostly not Christian and their religions seem much more vibrant that today's diffident and tentative Christianity. Christians won't have to wait very long for their demographic and spiritual extinction – one, perhaps two generations at the most.

The source of this Christian enervation and the start of the decline into feebleness can be dated quite precisely: 1962 to 1965, the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II). The Council nominally tweaked a few bits of Catholic dogma, but what it really did was to set off a much wider movement throughout much of Christendom (Catholic and Protestant) that validated the new social and cultural progressivism that flourished in the 1960s.

Among many other things, this movement relativised all faiths into a single ecumenical mush, at least in the heads of Christians. What used to be heretical in the good old days of burning at the stake was now OK – encouraged, even, and we thus landed in the diversity swamp. There was to be no criticism of other religions, however bizarre they might be to Enlightenment tastes: that was 'bigotry'.

Mohammedans in particular suddenly found tolerance, even accceptance, without the need to swing swords. Sikhs, Hindus and Buddhists all have their touchy aspects, but Mohammedanism is founded upon a culture of war, conquest and submission.

I use the term 'Mohammedanism', since that is the word I learned in school. It is a term in use in English at least since 1663, some time before my schooldays. The OED tells me not to use it, citing a 1992 opinion that 'The term Mohammedan..is considered offensive or pejorative to most Muslims since it makes human beings central in their religion, a position which only Allah may occupy'. The argument is specious and I am shocked – though unsurprised – that the woke OED propagates such nonsense so uncritically. They don't worry when the followers of the religion of Christ are called Christians.